Cryptome has a collection of AP photos from the Iraq war here.
I think all Americans need to see this, without turning away. Understand war.
Monthly Archive for May, 2006
Ouch. Looks like plagiarismtoday.com wasn’t ready for hordes of mindless Slashdotters to access their blog. Congratulations and condolences.
The latest Diebold debacle makes one think. If a county clerk is fired for attempting to assess the security of these voting machines, and the public is not allowed access to the source code then our Democracy has taken a fundamental shift. Our current sytem is open and verifiable. The system provided by Diebold is not! Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against computer based voting. In fact I think it is a good idea. However I think that a voting system needs the following to be compatable with American Democracy:
1.) Open Source
The American public has a right to know exactly how each vote is tallied. This means that the source code and design of any voting machine needs to be made available for public review.
2.) Immutable
A hard drive or flash card is not an acceptable media for storing votes. Each vote should be recorded on at least two permanent media sources. This redundancy is necessary to protect against equipment failure. For example the vote may be both printed out and written to a cdrom.
3.) Verifiable
Furthermore each vote should have a cryptographic checksum, which the voter receives as a receipt. The checksum will not show the actual contents of the vote, just that the vote was counted and is unaltered. The voter should be able to verify his vote online, and also could submit his receipt to his party or an independant observer.
For more information on the Diebold voting fiasco:
SecurityFocus
BradBlog
Wired
Click here to support whistelblower Bruce Funk.
A quick note:
I wasn’t able to edit my K2 styles from within Wordpress edit themes interface. I solved this by creating a symbolic link to the .css file from with the K2 directory. From your K2 dir ( blog/wp-content/themes/k2 ):
ln -s styles/mystyle.css mystyle.css
Problem solved!
The 2006 hurricane season is predicted to be a harsh one, with three major hurricanes striking the gulf. Don’t expect gas prices to go down, especially if one of these strikes Texas. Now this is just a crazy hypothesis, but maybe, just maybe this is how things work:
- Carbon dioxide emissions from 600 million cars seep into the atmosphere.
- The carbon dioxide traps energy from the sun in our atmosphere, raising the surface temperature of the Gulf of Mexico.
- The warm water creates more opportunities for hurricanes to form, producing a longer, more destructive hurricane season.
- The resulting hike in oil prices cause the citizens of the United States, a reasonable and adaptable people, to pool their resources and create a renewable energy economy.
Not that global warming is such a bad thing. We’re gonna need that Greenhouse Effect to keep warm during the Nuclear Winter.
It seemed inevitable, ICANN has finally voted no on the proposed .xxx domain. Political pressure by uninformed knee jerk reactionaries, have killed what would have been a elegant solution to one of the age old problems facing the net. This is bad news for families all around the world.
I’m wasting my breath now, but let me give you two real world examples:
ONE: I’m eight years old. I’m wandering through the video store alone. I don’t accidently stumble across any pornographic material, because it’s all contained in seperate area where I am not allowed. The data, considered offensive to some, is segregrated, voluntarily, by a cardboard partition. Now if I find that data an affront to all I believe in, I attack that. I don’t attack the partition that keeps my kids from accessing it!
TWO: It’s the nineties. A nice old lady is on the phone with her local ISP, she wants to know how to find information on the Internet. The friendly helpdesk guy points her to www.hotbot.com. Unfortunately she is hard of hearing and types in www.hotbox.com. “Why did you send me here?” this poor woman asks. There is no partition! Even if the owner of hotbox would prefer hotbox.xxx, he can’t have it. He doesn’t have that opportunity to mark his material as sexually explicit. Now the owner of HOT BOX® trademarked insulated enclosures might want www.hotbox.com, but he can’t have it.
The reality is that there are over 260 million porn sites out there, bringing in over 2.5 billion dollars. Ninety percent of all kids have viewed online porn, most while doing homework. Now I’m not saying that the .xxx domain is a perfect solution, but it is better than where we are now.
WP-Cache 2 is a great tool to speed up Wordpress 2 w/ K2. When I first tried to install it, I couldn’t get the darn thing to work. Eventually I downgraded PHP from 5.1.2 to 4.4.2. That did the trick. Just thought I would post in case someone else is encountering the same issue.
Google seems to be getting slow at indexing, and a little top heavy. Many of my searches seem to contain lots of noise and outdated information these days. Microsoft definitely has an opening. Amazon has dropped Google and turned to Microsoft for their search engine results. It begs the question; why? Maybe Microsoft has something going here. It’s time to take a look at Microsoft Live Search.
Continue reading ‘Comparing Google to Microsoft Live Search’
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